a city or town: a single walled settlement, the whole inhabited place rather than the region around it or the fort inside it
Every use of this word sits in one place: the letters in Ezra 4 that Persian officials and their king exchanged about whether Jerusalem could be rebuilt. It is the plain Aramaic word for a city, and what it names is something you could walk up to, with a wall that can be finished and foundations that can be repaired or left in ruins.
Because the setting is official correspondence, the word does administrative work. A city in these letters is a unit the empire keeps track of: it owes tribute, it sits inside a larger region, its past can be looked up in the royal records, and it can be ordered to stop building. That is why the officials keep writing "that city" instead of naming Jerusalem again. They are pointing at a case.
The letters then treat the place as though it had a character of its own, calling it rebellious and wicked and blaming it for damage done to kings. None of that comes from the word itself. Those are charges the accusers attach to it, and the one time the word names somewhere else, the city of Samaria in Ezra 4:10, it carries no such weight.
Two neighboring Aramaic words in these same chapters mark the edges of it: the far larger territory a city sits inside (מְדִינָה), and the guarded stronghold where the empire kept its archives (בִּירְתָא).